I’m not crazy about new jargon, but when old jargon completely loses its luster it’s time to replace.

“Awesome” certainly needs replacement.  So, IMHO, does “value proposition”.  It’s like when you repeat a word over and over until it sounds meaningless?  That’s what’s happened to me with Value Proposition.

So let’s try a new term for it, a “value promise”.

Arguably it’s a slightly better term.  A “proposition” is an entire proposal, a “business plan”, if you will.  In this era of Lean this and Lean that, a “value promise” is a Lean “value proposition.”  It’s part of a complete package.  It’s an element.

Here are three Value Promises I think are quite interesting in a business:

1. The “Amazon” Promise.  Amazon got its start by promising that you could get any book in the world at the site.  Now they kind of promise that you can get anything at all in the world at the site.  Any business that promises “all of <x>” is a powerful promise:
   • “Everything you wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask”
   • For my future website on “Intelligent Pitching”, I want to promise “everything you need to know about pitching”.
   • Zappos: “every kind of shoe”
2. The “Progressive” Promise.  Progressive Insurance made a big impression on me by promising to get you the best price on insurance, even if it’s a competitor’s offering.  Extremely useful in new markets where the very form of a solution is still not understood and there are competing approches:
   • “We’ll help you understand the best solution to your problem, including our competitors'”
   • “We’ll help you evaluate your timeshare agreement regardless of its form and tell you how to renegotiate it if appropriate”
3. The “Hammacher Schlemer” Promise.  Hammacher Schlemer is a gadget catalog (grandmother of SkyMall or Sharper Image), and every item in the catalog is either “best” or “only” in its category.  “Best Turkish towel bath robe”.  “Only infrared drone taser.”  This value promise is very important for establishing competitive differentiation.  Compared to your competitors, where are you “best” or “only”.  And if your “best or only” is some squirrely little niche, how do you pivot?

Well, the news is I left @ValhallaVC after 12 years.

I had been thinking for some time of ways to expand my writing, speaking, teaching, coaching, and mentoring, which have given me more and more satisfaction in the past few years.  When the opportunity presented itself, my partners at Valhalla and I worked through an amiable separation, and, since April 30, here I am.

Lots of food for thought in this, and I’m talking with friends and business buddies about the implications and the next steps.

But, unexpectedly, I’ve begun to wonder about keeping 2 cars in the family.

I had toyed with alternative commutes to Tysons (some 13 miles each way) over the years.  I tried the Silver Line several times (apologies to non-DC audience for these local details) and found it was pretty good in the morning and routinely problematic in the afternoons.  There was, as Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “always something.”

I also looked into a ZipCar at the Tysons end of the commute, figuring that I could get out there by public transportation and then use the ZipCar for errands.  The arithmetic never seemed to work out: it was way too much per putative errand.

Now that I’m not commuting at all, however, the arithmetic looks a little different.

If I could bike around for a batch of local local errands and then use either Car2Go or ZipCar for less local trips, it might actually work out.

First, the bike.

I trotted out my hybrid bike from the garage last weekend and found that it has a broken spoke.  I’ll either fix it or have “them” fix it.  My (Valhalla) partner Harry says that a spoke replacement is either easy or it isn’t.  That makes sense to me.

Car2Go and ZipCar are not entirely competitors.  The wisdom of the InterTubes seems to be that Car2Go is more like a taxi and ZipCar is more like a rental car.

Car2Go cars are small and relatively useless for anything besides getting your body someplace (or back from someplace).  New Yorkers I know will schlep groceries or plywood or even (in the case of my friend Ellen) 50-lb bags of sand in a taxi, but that’s extreme.  It’s mostly about personal transportation.

ZipCar is for longer trips, with a more varied selection of cars/trucks, and the possibility of doing some serious hauling if necessary.

Car2Go has one fee for a lifetime signup, and then hourly usage fees.  ZipCar has an annual fee (as well as — how lame is this? — an “initiation” fee) in addition to hourly fees.  And apparently Car2Go pays out for short trips, ZipCar for longer ones.

So I signed up for Car2Go, and am waiting for them to approve my membership (based, they say, on my driving record, which is decent).  And then I’ll see about ZipCar, which has those Other Fees.

We’ve been poring over Trump commentary in the past couple of weeks with horrified fascination.

On the one hand, it’s delightful to preside over the collapse of a political party devoted to hating science and keeping women barefoot and pregnant.

On the other hand, the idea of Trump-as-President is scary.

There’s no shortage of Hitler comparisons around, but he really isn’t much like Hitler (at least not yet).  He’s not very ideological.  He doesn’t lead a fascist movement.  (Although he does smart over past wounds to the US.  And he is a racist, down to the remarks about who some of his best friends are.)

But my wife Debbie came up with the right analogy today.

“Trump’s really like Kim Jong Un in a nice suit,” she said.  And that said it all.

Crisply saying what you’re up to is a real art form, and, like any art, there are more bad examples than good.

One of my pet peeves is the “Uber of <mumble>” tag line.

“What do you guys do?”

“Oh, we’re the Uber of musical instruments.”

OK.  What does that mean?  It has to be explained anyhow.  It’s almost never obvious.  And so the tag line fails in its mission, which is to crisply say what you’re up to.

In fact, cutesy metaphors like this almost never work.

In this case, if you said, instead, “we let owners lend out their musical instruments to paying users, like Uber,” you would accomplish much more with fewer net words, and, by the way, you’d say something about your business model and your value proposition.

Tag lines, elevator pitches, one-liners, one-minute summaries, they are invitations to confuse instead of summarize.

Why?

I think people hate elevator pitches because they make the power assymetry between the pitch-or and the pitch-ee obvious.

Imagine the situation: you’re in the elevator with your “prospect”, and you have a very short amount of time to get his/her interest for your project.  It’s sell or die.  You are the Pursuer, and they are the Pursued.  It’s an invitation to a Righteous Indignation Party, and, as we know, crappy humor and indignation are closely related.

But put yourself in the recipient’s shoes for a moment.  Someone you know nothing about is about to make a demand on you: for your time, for your attention; for your investment, perhaps.  If the first words out of their mouths are, “think of it like Uber for musical instruments,” the encounter will not go well.

If the first words, instead, are “I’m trying to raise money for a business idea letting owners lend out their musical instruments for money.  Are you interested?” it’s, as they say, a horse of a different color.

Spend the time to boil down your statement to something crisp, not something cute.

I’m noodling the topic of “mastering fear”, partly for personal reasons — gotta master The Fear one of these years — and partly for possible writing/blog/book topics.

I recall the comments in Dune on “fear is the mind-killer”.  I recall Carlos Castenada’s Don Juan on the topic of fear: I believe he thought fear was the first Great Enemy (btw, the last great enemy is Old Age, that creeps up on you while you’re battling the other Great Enemies).  Actually, I may well re-read Don Juan on this subject; he’s worth listening to.

I recall Aristotle’s idea that courage was the mean between fear and foolhardiness, but I don’t recall he gave much practical advice on how to move into the Zone of that golden mean.

I’m after practical steps Average Joe’s and Jill’s can use to master fear rather than hymns of praise to courage.   Would appreciate any help you can offer.

Just got back from a week-long project in Sao Paulo.

Great people, good work, our team did a great job.

The hotel they put us up in was nice, and very pleasant.

Except that the only way to get a drinking glass was to “buy” one from the mini-bar.

I’ve had my share of plastic drinking glasses, plastic-wrapped “sanitized” drinking glasses, and fancy ones too.

But I’ve never been in a hotel where you had to buy your drinking glass.

A day that will live in min-bar infamy.

1. Earlids.  These would work just like eyelids but for our ears.  Better yet would be invisible earlids, so they could be closed and no one would know.
2. Tails.  You could twitch your tail expressively, ironically, contrapuntally in meetings.  A whole new dimension in body language.

I get asked for referrals to investors a lot, and since my writing has spun up I also get asked for referrals to publishers and agents.

I read a bunch of years ago some advice that seemed quite sensible for finding an agent:

Find one or two books that are just like the one you want to do, find out who agents those authors, and ping them.

Of course, no book is “just like” your baby, but there are cousins, maybe even fraternal twins.

Maybe this is terrible advice, but, like I said, it made sense to me.

And it makes sense in the investor context too.  Find one or two startups that are doing something similar or cousin-ly to what you want to do, find out who invested in those companies, and ping them.

One might say that I’m just letting myself off the hook of actually daring to refer somebody to an investor or agent I already know.  But I’ve done that.  I’ve done that enough to know that you can’t force oil and water together if they don’t want to go.

Maybe this is awful advice.  If so, please let me know and I’ll pass on your POV.

As those of you who know me a bit know, I take New Year’s resolutions pretty seriously, and try to lay out ambitious, but attainable, goals, objectives, values, principles, and such-like every New Year.

(Nothing sacred about New Years, by the way.  But nothing wrong with it either, and it does have the virtue, like summer vacation, that I have a bit of down time to step back and thing about the Bigger Picture.)

So one resolution (or goal, or habit, I’m not entirely clear on the distinctions) for 2016 is: Make-ahead lunches.

There’s a couple of converging streams of better-ness here.

1. Save Money.  I’ve been scheming to get down the price of my lunches over the last couple of years, and have gotten them down to $5-6 a lunch going to our local Asian steam-table restaurant.  Not bad, and a lot better than the $12-15 I started with.  But getting under $5 seemed to involve either excessive deprivation or making lunches at home.
2. Nutritious meals.  Making my own lunches seemed to be the ideal way to get into them exactly what I wanted (although, as we shall see, the making-ahead aspect introduces some constraints.)
3. Fascination with bulk methods in food prep.  Something about making the lunches ahead — in bulk — captured my imagination.  As you may or may not know, there’s a OAMM (Once-a-month meals) meme out there on the Net with something of an infrastructure, thought leaders, etc.    Check out the (commercial) onceamonthmeals.com site or just Google it.
4. “Productivity”.  I’m not 100% sure that make-ahead meals are more productive, but I’m prepared to believe it, and prepared to experiment with it.

So, if you Google “make-ahead lunches” you will get a hodge-podge of once-a-month, once-a-week, and “night-before” lunch recipes and schemes.  I did some reading and digging around and Web clipping over the holidays, and ended up learning two things about myself:

• I’m not ready for once-a-month prep — lunch or all meals — at this time (and maybe never).  Too much of a hump for me, plus I’m not sure I believe the hype about how it saves you time.  Plus I had a hard time seeing how you could get the variety you wanted for a whole month in advance.  No flexibility in it.  You’re stuck with the work of the You who made those meals at the beginning of the month.
• I want minimum same-day prep.  My morning routine has a lot of moving parts — writing, meditating, helping the dog, etc. — without adding more stuff to it.  My perfect same-day lunch routine would consist of fetching a container out of the fridge or freezer and adding it to the heap of gear I take with me out to the car.

So, that means once-a-week prep of 1-3 different lunch meals that I can freeze or refrigerate and will last the week in that form.

As far as I can make out, that kind of puts the kabosh on make-ahead salads, because they either they don’t last out the week (soggy, wilted, etc.) or they require same-day prep (add the dressing, croutons, whatever).  I’m still open to salads, but for now I’m focusing on soups, wraps, and possibly sandwiches.

For Week 1 (this week), I made a batch of burritos using this approach from kitchn.com and shredded chicken made this way from Picky Palate.  I wrapped each one in aluminum foil and froze them.  I also made a couple of servings of Italian Wedding soup from a big batch my wife had made up on Sunday.

I’m scheming ahead for Week 2, and would welcome any links, tips, pointers, or suggestions.